Following recent reports of attempts to dump over 7 million ETC tokens by the White Hat team, the Ethereum Classic community has released its ‘Declaration of Independence’ in which it lists its grievances and lays out the principles that govern its ecosystem.

“Let it be known to the entire world that on July 20th, 2016, at block 1,920,000, we as a community of sovereign individuals stood united by a common vision to continue the original Ethereum blockchain that is truly free from censorship, fraud or third party interference”, the declaration reads.

Speaking of grievances, the document first pointed out the rush of the leadership of Ethereum Foundation towards the creation of a “soft fork”, which involved violating the principles and values coded therein. Secondly, it highlighted the unrepresentative voting mechanism – “carbon vote” – which was initially stated “unofficial” only to be contradicted later.

The last grievance is regarding rushing the creation of a “hard fork” that violated the properties of immutability, fungibility, and the sanctity of the Ethereum ledger.

“[W]illfully deciding to not include replay protection in the “hard fork”, an action which has unnecessarily cost exchanges and thousands of users the rightful ownership of their Ether tokens”, it added.

The declaration further stated as many of the Foundation’s developers have disregarded the core tenets, the Ethereum Classic community has formed a code of principles to follow for the Ethereum Classic chain:

• The purpose of Ethereum Classic is to provide a decentralized platform that runs decentralized applications which execute exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
   
• Code is law; there shall be no changes to the Ethereum Classic code that violate the properties of immutability, fungibility, or sanctity of the ledger; transactions or ledger history cannot for any reason be reversed or modified.
   
• Forks and/or changes to the underlying protocol shall only be permitted for updating or upgrading the technology on which Ethereum Classic operates.
   
• Internal project development can be funded by anyone, whether via a trusted third party of their choice or directly, using the currency of their choice on a per project basis and following a transparent, open and decentralized crowdfunding protocol.
   
• Any individual or group of individuals may propose improvements, enhancements, or upgrades to existing or proposed Ethereum Classic assets.
   
• Any individual or group of individuals may use the Ethereum Classic decentralized platform to build decentralized applications, hold crowdsales, create autonomous organisations/corporations, or for any other purpose they deem suitable.